Even beauty can be blurred

Aside from a fuel stop on my way to Viet Nam in the 70’s … this was my first ‘feet on the ground’ experience in Hawaii. With only two days and one night and a banquet to conduct and follow-up to handle, there wouldn’t be much sightseeing.

But I had my throw away camera and a couple of hours to capture the magic of this paradise.

I couldn’t wait to get home, have the pictures developed and bring Joanie into the experience. She’d love the views. She’d start saving from our food budget for a trip to the isles together. She’d have trouble sleeping at night imagining the incredible sights.

And imagine is what she had to do. My pictures had as much appeal as if they had been taken inside a gulag. Several of them looked like they had been snapped inside a Costco warehouse. The water was cloudy, the sky a milky white, the sand resembled poorly laid concrete.

Nowhere in my roll of film did the glory of Oahu come through. My wife’s pulse didn’t quicken. Hawaii wasn’t someplace she now longed to visit. And I had wasted $8 on a throw-away camera.

The Apostle Paul wrote of this conundrum in the love chapter – I Corinthians 13. He said, “For now we are looking in a mirror that gives on a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes] we shall see in reality and face to face!” verse 12 Amplified Bible

A lot of life is blurred to us. We are often too close to grasp the full picture. Or we have too few facts available to put ‘two and two’ together. And heaven fits right into that scenario.

God has given us enough information into that glorious realm that we can in faith label it glorious … but the snapshots He’s given us probably don’t do it justice. They don’t even come close. There are those who have seen some of its splendor and come back and tried to detail it for us, but even the most powerful recounting can’t get the reality to us.

Ah, but one day we will not just visit there, but move there and finally the blurriness will become crystal clear. The veil will be lifted. The presence of our Savior and the eternal glory of that ‘unclouded day’ will finally be ours to savor.

And there will be no return flight  to take us back home … for we will be home!

Enjoy the journey and keep in mind where the journey will end!